Firestopping Milwaukee’s Tallest Residential High-Rise: ‘We Just Fly Through It’

On the Milwaukee lakefront, the finishing touches are being applied to the tallest residential high-rise building in the entire state of Wisconsin, an impressive new addition to the city’s skyline. This 44-story tower is, clearly, a monumental feat of architecture — and, in its interior, a feat of high-stakes drywall finishing.

Why? The skyscraper’s narrow, elliptical shape means each of its units have a curve to at least one of its walls, and these walls abut concrete ceilings and columns that aren't always perfectly straight. Combined, these challenges mean that finishing drywall within these apartments wouldn’t be a straightforward task; any drywall accessory used here would need to bend along with every substrate’s many varying contours. This made Trim-Tex’s flexible, adaptable vinyl beads the perfect fit for drywall contractor Common Links’ needs.

Common Links used several Trim-Tex beads and accessories throughout the Milwaukee tower, from expansion beads to Tear Aways. Today, we’ll look at how they used one of our fire rated drywall accessories, Hotrod XL, to exponentially speed up (and clean up) their firestopping processes. Watch the video below and read on to learn how.

Hotrod XL: ‘It’s very fast and it’s very clean’

With 322 residential units, plus retail and restaurant space, every second counts for contractors like Common Links and Taper Foreman Mitch Groenke. So, with firestop materials specified between each and every unit, wasting time on using fire sealant — well-known for its inconsistency and trickiness to get right — within every single head-of-wall gap just wasn’t going to be efficient enough on this project.

Luckily, they found a better way when they discovered Trim-Tex’s multifaceted firestopping solution, Hotrod XL.

“We normally fire caulk everything,” Groenke tells us. “It takes a lot of time, it’s messy. It's a lot of labor, a lot of time wasted … [Hotrod XL] was brought to me by my PM. They used it on another job and they loved it — and the owner loved it when he saw that at this other building, and he had us use it here. Once I got it figured out and everything, I think it's very fast and it's very clean — a lot cleaner look, the finished product. It's a cement ceiling here and a lot of the cement is up and down and wavy. You had to learn how to adjust it and cut the funnel of it to get it to bend and follow the contour of the ceiling.

“It's a lot faster. We just fly through it. There's nine units on a floor and, in the beginning, it'd take us almost a day, two guys to do it. Now, I got two guys can do it in three hours now that we've got it dialed in.”

Hotrod XL was the perfect choice for this particular project due to its inherent adaptability and flexibility. This solution is comprised of a few elements: a compressible foam that, when inserted into wall joints, can fill the space even when the size of the gap fluctuates; a high-quality vinyl bead with a flexible gasket that compresses and expands to safeguard the finish from the stresses of deflection; and a strip of intumescent tape that expands when exposed to heat, sealing off the wall joint and protecting the wall system from the spread of fire and smoke.

At this Milwaukee high-rise, firestopping between units and protection from the effects of building movement were, of course, code requirements. The added challenge would come from the shape of the units, and the building itself: where there weren’t curves, there were small details with sharp corners in tight spaces. So, to replace fire caulk, you would need a solution that could conform to both contours — and, on top of code compliance, make the whole thing look great when it's finished.

“We have a lot of soffits that are radius soffits, and [Hotrod XL] just bends with it and just flows with it,” says Mitch. “Then we've got a lot of corners that we can just adjust and nip and cut and bend it around the corner and just flow around. It looks really clean. It's a finished product that everybody is going to see. That's what's so big about it. It makes it so much more appealing to everybody else.”

Thank you to Common Links and Mitch Groenke for inviting us out to this project and letting us admire their expert drywall work. To get a look at Hotrod XL for yourself, hit the button below to request a free sample.

Firestopping Milwaukee’s Tallest Residential High-Rise: ‘We Just Fly Through It’

Hotrod XL: ‘It’s very fast and it’s very clean’

Request a Free Sample of Hotrod XL